As a business owner or marketer, you probably already know that driving traffic to your website is only half the battle. The real challenge is converting those visitors into paying customers.
That's where CRO, or conversion rate optimisation, comes in. It’s the answer when you’re struggling to see the results you want from your website.
If you want to learn more, read on as we explore CRO and some of the best and most effective practices for it. Let’s begin with answering a question some of you may be asking, though: What is conversion rate optimisation?
What is CRO?
As the name suggests, conversion rate optimisation is all about improving your website or landing page performance to increase the percentage of conversions on it.
Remember that a conversion can be any action you want a consumer to take. It could be equivalent to that consumer making a purchase, for instance, but it can also be equivalent to him filling out a form.
Thus, the conversion rate optimisation definition tells you that CRO is about the ways to nudge people into taking the action that you consider a conversion. There are many ways to do it, but below are our tried-and-tested favourites.
Effective CRO Practices to Boost Conversions
1. Identify Your Goals
Seems simple? It is, but it’s also an essential CRO practice that far too many business owners and marketers overlook.
You see, without clear goals, you’ll struggle to guide the rest of your CRO. You won’t be able to measure the success of your efforts and you won’t know which strategies work or need improvement.
Identify your goals and define what specific actions you want your visitor to take on your website or landing page. It’s also wise to specify the metrics you want to track relevant to this, whether they’re click-through rates, form submissions, sign ups, etc.
2. Test your pages
Using A/B Testing allows you to compare different versions of your pages to see which ones perform better and can generate more conversions. This is a great way to gradually arrive at the techniques that actually work best with your target audience.
As such, A/B testing is one of the most powerful CRO techniques. By helping you identify which elements or strategies on your website or pages based on real-world data, it takes a lot of the guesswork out of CRO.
This means you can avoid over-relying on assumptions about what your visitors prefer or how they will respond to your content. Instead, you work off empirical data instead, making informed decisions about how to improve your pages and achieve your goals.
This data-driven approach can help you refine and optimise your website or landing pages to maximize your conversion rates and drive more sales.
3. Optimise your website content
Website content plays a critical role in engaging visitors and persuading them to take action, regardless of your CTA goals. That’s why it’s vital to optimise it for best results.
The most common techniques include using persuasive headings or subheadings, writing compelling copy, using visuals to complement your content, and so on. Taken together, these can help you craft persuasive, useful content focused on your target audience.
4. Improve user experience
One of the best ways to lead people into conversion is to make sure the way is clear for them. In other words, make sure there aren’t a ton of obstacles for your site visitors when they’re navigating your site!
A good way to ensure this is to streamline your website navigation and structure. Make it as easy as possible for visitors to find the information they need and take action.
You can also study your visitors’ behaviour and try to find pain points in their user experience. This can lead to improvements in site navigation, content, and design that make your site more appealing to stay on in the first place.
That means more opportunities for the rest of your CRO efforts to work, as well as increase
5. Improve Page Load Speed
Here’s another effective CRO practice that can help boost conversions by reducing visitor click-off. Make sure your pages load as fast as possible!
Why? Well, imagine being stuck on a page that takes half a minute to load.
Most people just aren’t willing to wait that long any longer. They’ll very likely close the browser tab – and you’ll lose a potential conversion when that happens.
Many tests have shown that slow page load speed can bring down user experience and lead to high bounce rates. Visitors often become frustrated and abandon a slow site before it fully loads.
Even worse, this often brings down your ranking in the SERPs (search engine results pages) too. This is because a lot of search engines like Google actually prefer sites with good page load speed and tend to rank them higher.
You can try to get around this by using something like SEM to secure an ad spot at the top of Google’s SERPs by paying for it, of course. But that still won’t help you if customers get bored waiting for your site to load and leave shortly after visiting it.
6. Use social proof
This one works because people are more likely to take the leap and “convert” when they see others have had a positive experience with the same product or service they’re eyeing.
Remember that people often look to their communities to find reviews on various things that interest them. Social media is one of the places many of them check out, often to validate (or discourage) a potential purchase they’re planning.
To make this work for them, businesses can showcase recognisable customers or brands by displaying their images or logos on their website or social media page as proof of trust.
Brands can also encourage their customers to review their products or services online, whether through Google or social media.
Then, they can display or promote those reviews on their own pages. Seeing those testimonials can instil confidence in other potential customers and encourage them to convert.
This can be a surprisingly effective way of establishing a business’s trust and credibility to the point where conversions improve as more people believe in its legitimacy.
Begin working on your CRO now
Overall, CRO is an important aspect of every marketing campaign. Even if you drive a million visitors to your website or landing page, you won’t be able to turn them into meaningful sales or other gains if you can’t get a decent number to convert.
This is why CRO is so important. It lets businesses make use of the traffic their marketing has yielded and gives them a chance to actually benefit from it.
If you need help with your CRO beyond what we’ve already discussed here, reach out to us. We’ve done CRO for most of our clients and gained them significant improvements in conversion.
Want to learn more? Contact us for a chat about your digital marketing needs.
Comments